Introduction Four years past, the landscape of online gambling painted a stark contrast to today’s flourishing scene. Within Europe’s vast expanse of licensed online casinos, a mere 5% embraced cryptocurrency as a viable banking method. Furthermore, these few pioneers in online gambling placed a restrictive boundary on using cryptocurrencies. Instead of letting gamblers use their digital assets directly, these platforms mandated a conversion to the casino’s chosen currency. This stipulation inevitably led to multiple complications, notably those related to rapid fluctuations in cryptocurrency ..read more

Dubai, United Arab Emirates, July 13th, 2023, Chainwire XBorg, the Web3 company developing a collaborative credential infrastructure that allows players to create their digital identity and enjoy tailored user experiences within enhanced gaming applications, sold out their $2 million seed round community allocation in record time. The funds will facilitate the scaling and adoption efforts of XBorg’s infrastructure and applications to reach millions of players and fans worldwide. Ahead of the raise, XBorg collected interest from more than 8,300 investors totalling $7M in soft commitments but ..read more

Celsius is currently going through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding. Last week, the US CFTC found Celsius and Alex Mashinsky guilty of breaking several laws before Celsius collapsed in 2022. Alex Mashinsky has been arrested and will be arrayed in court on Friday. Celsius Network, a cryptocurrency lending company that collapsed in 2022, is the target of enforcement action by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). According to a Bloomberg report, the SEC has sued Celsius Network and its former CEO Alex Mashinsky. The report, however, stated that specifics of the complaint were no ..read more

Key takeaways BNB Chain is set to undergo its ZhangHeng upgrade later this month. The upgrade will address blockchain exploit risks, and no new BNB tokens will be issued.  BNB Chain to undergo a major hard fork later this month BNB Chain, the blockchain of the Binance ecosystem, is set to undergo its “ZhangHeng” upgrade later this month. According to the development team, the upgrade will massively improve security features for users. The BNB team believes that network security remains a cause for concern within the cryptocurrency industry. The hard fork is set to take place on 19 ..read more

The proportion of traditional hedge funds investing in crypto assets declined in the past 12 months though the long-term outlook remains positive, according to a new report by Big Four accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC). The percentage of funds with crypto exposure fell to 29% from 37% in 2022, according to the Global Crypto Hedge Fund Report. No traditional hedge funds plan to decrease their exposure this year, it said. More than a third (37%) of funds without crypto exposure said they are curious, but are waiting for the asset class to mature further. That’s up from the 30 ..read more

Zero-knowledge rollup ZKM has been unveiled out of incubation from the MetisDAO Foundation, saying it plans to make Ethereum the “universal settlement layer for all blockchain and non-blockchain applications.” With funding from the foundation that oversees development of Metis, a layer-2 Ethereum protocol, ZKM is developing a hybrid approach that combines Optmistic and Zero-Knowledge rollups into one, according to an emailed announcement on Thursday. Rollups are a way of bundling transactions to improve throughput and lower transaction costs. The system plans to start operating on the E ..read more

Ondo Finance, which already offers tokenized U.S. Treasurys on the Ethereum blockchain, expanded the product to the Polygon network. The company has issued its OUSG token, a tokenized version of BlackRock’s short-term U.S. government bond exchange-traded fund (ETF), natively on Polygon as part of a “strategic alliance,” according to a press release Thursday. The firm also plans to bring its upcoming yield-generating stablecoin alternative, which is a tokenized money market fund called OMMF, as well as the Ondo-developed decentralized lending marketplace Flux Finance – pending governance ..read more

Alex Mashinksy, co-founder and former CEO of insolvent crypto lender Celsius was arrested on Thursday following an investigation into the company’s collapse, according to a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) indictment. Mashinsky and others are charged with seven counts including securities fraud, commodities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to manipulate the price of Celsius’ token CEL. The DOJ indictment was accompanied by a slew of separate lawsuits against Mashinsky and Celsius by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and Federa ..read more

This is an opinion editorial by Bitcoms, a Bitcoin writer. “So quick bright things come to confusion”  –William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” “Inscriptions” are a way of writing pieces of arbitrary information onto the Bitcoin blockchain. “Ordinals” are a convention used for tracking individual sats and linking them to inscriptions. This article does not attempt to argue for or against Bitcoin Ordinal inscriptions. Rather, it argues against the confusing, inaccurate and sometimes dubious ways they can be presented, marketed and sold. It deals with a widespread fallacy which ..read more

Lightning HTTP 402 Protocol, also known as L402, is a way to charge for services and authenticate users in distributed networks. It combines two powerful tools — Macaroons, and of course, the Lightning Network. Macaroons are special tokens used for authentication. They include permissions and can be verified using a root key. The documentation states this is important for systems where we want to avoid or cannot go about looking up the validity of each token. Lightning is a Layer 2 solution for making fast and secure bitcoin payments. L402 leverages the capabilities of Macaroons and Lightning ..read more